To Say Nothing of the Dog

Ned Henry is an Oxford historian in 2057, and he has time lag: too many jumps to the past in too few weeks, running errands for Lady Schrapnell, an American millionaire who is rebuilding Coventry Cathedral exactly as it stood before the German bombing of November 1940. The one object still missing is the bishop's bird stump, a Victorian flower vase of such comprehensive ugliness that nobody can describe it and everybody remembers it.

To let Ned rest, his supervisor sends him to 1888, where his instructions are garbled and he understands almost nothing. There he joins a boating party on the Thames, meets a don, a bulldog and a cat, and discovers that another historian has already brought something back from the past that should have stayed there, which may have altered the outcome of the Second World War.

The novel is an affectionate rewrite of Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat, whose actual characters row past at one point, crossed with a country house comedy, a seance, a hopeless romance and a genuinely clever plot about causality that pays off every apparently pointless digression.

It is the sunniest thing Willis wrote and reads like a holiday, though at five hundred pages it takes its time and the farce of people misunderstanding each other is sustained for a very long stretch.

Read Doomsday Book first if you want, but it is not required. Best for readers who want Wodehouse with a time machine and a real puzzle underneath.